Can DA turn Limpopo around?

Johannesburg - Limpopo is a collapsed province, said the Democratic Alliance at its provincial congress on Saturday.

“Limpopo is, by any reasonable definition, a collapsed province,” the party's parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko said in a speech prepared for delivery.

“There can be no other way to describe its status when the central government assumes many of the province's powers and functions.”

Last month, the province's education department was in the news when the High Court in Pretoria ruled that its failure to provide textbooks to schools violated students' constitutional right to education.

The department was told to devise a catch-up plan to remedy the consequences of its delay in supplying teaching material.

Days later, Anis Karodia, head of the national intervention team in the Limpopo education department, was fired. He had been on the job for three months at the time of his retrenchment.

Education is one of five provincial departments that were placed under administration by cabinet in December 2011 following bad governance and financial irregularities.

On Saturday, Mazibuko said that the DA should take inspiration from the 'Arab Spring' set of uprisings when it came to Limpopo.

“Let this be the place where the DA “forced the spring”, and turned Limpopo's politics upside down.” - Sapa